This third volume of essays under the title The Shaping of English Poetry includes, as in the previous volumes, essays on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Langland, Chaucer and Spenser; it also includes essays on Beowulf and Dante. It was never the author s intention to exclude Old English poetry from the historical continuum of English poetry, and practical rather than ideological considerations explain the absence of Beowulf from the two previous volumes. The language of Beowulf is in all essentials the language of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight...

This collection of essays sets out to correct an injustice to citizens of the Irish Free State, or Twenty-Six Counties, whose contribution to the victory against Nazi Germany in the Second World War has thus far been obscured. The historical facts reveal a divided island of Ireland, in which the volunteers from the South were obliged to fight in a foreign (that is, British) army, navy and air force. Recent research has now placed this contribution on a secure basis of historical and statistical fact for the first time, showing that the total number of Irish dead (more than nine thousand) was...